I was under the impression you weren't able to go past the current course materials. I.e. you can't teach AOW until they already have OW type stuff. For the courses we teach, it's not possible to produce the divers we do because of the drills and skills we require them to do.
MFS full ditch and don, skin diving circuit, bunch of buoyancy drills that we REQUIRE in order for them to get to OWT. We teach full face masks, underwater surveying, lift bags etc in our scuba 2 class and couldn't get away with all of our requirements with PADI. Not a problem for 99% of the scuba world, but in our closed off little pool it's tough. NAUI lets us do whatever we want whenever we want to do it
I agree with you on PADI materials being better, the ones from NAUI are junk...
Like I said, if I were a dive shop, I'd do PADI in a heartbeat. Liability concerns is one, it's damn near impossible to sue PADI or it's instructors if you follow their curriculum outlines, so it's safer, easier to teach faster due to the course materials, and if you have joe schmoe walking in off the street he MAY have heard of PADI, but he probably has never heard of NAUI before, or SDI/TDI etc.
There's nothing wrong with the way PADI teaches, it's good, but it's not for me and the program I work with.